Author: Michelle Malkin
Publication: New York Post
Date: May 30, 2004
While the media remain fixated on
the plight of Muslim prisoners in Iraq, they have largely ignored the danger
that radicalized Muslim prisoners pose here at home.
The Justice Department's inspector
general this month released a disturbing report that exposed federal prisons
as a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. It was a red alert on a bureaucratic
failure that jeopardizes not only other inmates and prison employees, but
also the country at large. Yet it got next to no notice.
Islamic extremists have infiltrated
jails worldwide to lure convicts to their murderous cause. The problem
is thought to be much worse in Europe. For example, Richard Reid, the "Shoe
Bomber," converted to Islam with the help of an extremist imam in a British
prison. In France, thousands of Muslim inmates have been schooled in jihad
against "the Western powers and the Jews who manipulate them," as one widely
circulated prison pamphlet puts it. Radicalized French detainees have reportedly
erected a "terrorist university" behind bars offering anti-Western material
and instruction in bomb-making.
But we know it happens in America,
too. Jose Padilla, the accused "Dirty Bomber," converted to Islam during
a stint at a Broward County, Fla., jail and is alleged to have fallen in
with terrorist recruiters after his release.
And Aqil Collins, a self-confessed
jihadist turned FBI informant, converted to Islam while doing time in a
California juvenile detention center. At a terrorist camp in Afghanistan,
he went on to train with one of the men accused of kidnapping and beheading
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Yet the inspector general's report
warned that even the relatively well-managed federal prison system has
lagged on addressing the threat.
The report was done at the request
of Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) after The Wall Street
Journal reported on the scandalous employment of Warith Deen Umar, former
head Islamic chaplain of New York's state prison system, who also served
as a federal U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) contractor.
The Journal quoted Umar saying at
a public event, "Even Muslims who say they are against terrorism secretly
admired and applaud [the 9/11 hijackers]." It also reported Umar stating
he believed black inmates who converted to Islam in prison were logical
recruits for committing future terrorist attacks against America. Both
state and federal officials fired him in the wake of the article.
The BOP's 105 facilities hold 150,000
inmates (6 to 17 percent of them Muslim) - just a small fraction of the
total U.S. prison population of 2 million. I shudder to think how al Qaeda
is doing among the much larger population in the 50 state systems. In New
York, Umar had free rein to hire more than 40 Muslim chaplains over 25
years.
The inspector general found that
the BOP has also been lax - thanks in no small part to political correctness:
* BOP has no policy in place to
screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains.
* It also fails to properly screen
the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services
to Islamic inmates.
* Some prison officials fear that
such "religious profiling" would be illegal. (As the inspector general
noted, it's not.)
* "Information flow process" problems
continue to hold up BOP and FBI background checks on Muslim personnel.
* Against federal regulations, Muslim
inmates have been allowed to conduct services in loosely monitored chapels.
* Foreign convicts are importing
radical Islamic beliefs and converting their cellmates, who spread their
terrorist poison when they transfer to other prisons.
* Alarmingly, corrections officials
told the investigators "that convicted terrorists from the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing were put into their prisons' general population ,where they
radicalized inmates and told them that terrorism was part of Islam."
* Chaplains also reported that Islamic
extremist prisoners at one federal institution preached that if other inmates
were going to convert to Islam, they had to overthrow the U.S. government
because "Muslims aren't cowards."
* Despite several such cases, some
federal facilities don't even monitor volunteers' contact with prisoners
- thanks to false concerns about "privacy rights" and "religious freedom."
This is a national-security scandal
of the first order. But most news outlets remain far more interested in
publishing shocking photos and dissecting the details of sensational videos
from Abu Ghraib. Or trying to make hay of alleged isolated incidents of
abuse during the immediate post-9/11 detention of illegal Arab and Muslim
aliens initially suspected of terrorist ties.
When the inspector general, for
example, released a spring 2003 report critical of some aspects of the
detention process, The New York Times carried a nearly 1,600-word front-page
story accompanied by a lengthy excerpt from the report. By contrast, this
month's report on the Islamist prison threat got a story less than half
the size - buried on page 24.
Similarly, Newsweek ignored the
report on the security risks of militant Islam in prisons, but found space
to hype the existence of "secret videotapes" allegedly showing abuse of
Arab and Muslim detainees held after 9/11 at the Metropolitan Detention
Center in Brooklyn. (They were reportedly strip-searched and subjected
to prison guards who "laughed, exchanged suggestive looks and made funny
noises.") The headline: "Prison Scandal: Brooklyn's Version of Abu Ghraib?"
The Abu Ghraib scandal-mongers who
are so quick to diagnose the problems at the Iraqi prison as "systemic"
are the same kind of apologists for Islamic extremists who dismiss al Qaeda-linked
prison thugs as isolated rogues. The editorialists who adore the inspector
general when he highlights alleged prison abuses of Muslims will undoubtedly
condemn him for advocating religious profiling to prevent Islamist inmates
from spreading their hate. Such persistent politically correct double standards
are a deadly curse on all Americans.
E-mail: malkin@comcast.net
